Like Guitar in Son of Solomon, and Son in Tar Baby, he believed that harmony could never exist between the races.

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

Jealousy we understood and thought natural... But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are

Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.

I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.